differential VS connect-es

Fair question.

> But for the service to start it needs to get a request (via lambda invocation).

A service can also start by manually `.invoke`-ing the lambda.

The control-plane will start the lambda function when there's work. Lambda "asks" for work to do. Once work has finished, lambda function exits.

When deploying, we start the lambda function once so it can come out for air and advertise itself to the control-plane.

This is an affordance we do only do for lambda, and currently in development with our deployment offering here [1]

[1] https://github.com/differentialhq/differential/blob/236ffc53...

Hello HN!

Over the last few months I've been working on Differential.dev.

It's a tool that I built to solve the problem of connecting n domain services, with the simplest possible abstraction - function calls. (Typescript only for now)

Internally it uses a service bus that ferries functions calls, but all of this is abstracted away from a developer. You can use it (as I have) in brown-field projects to split a monolithic service to domain-driven services, without splitting the codebase.

It's fully open-source under a GPL 3.0 License: https://github.com/differentialHQ/differential

Keen for feedback, if you have any. You can also contact me at nadeesha at differential.dev.

> However, it's important to note that browser support wasn't a primary focus in gRPC's design. This oversight necessitates an additional component, grpc-web, for browser accessibility. Furthermore, external services often have specific needs like caching and load balancing, which are not directly catered to by gRPC. Adopting gRPC for external services might require bespoke solutions to support these features.

The article should mention the Connect protocol for web-based Protobuf messaging:

https://connectrpc.com/

We can solve this with a service! Now there are many ways I could have started, but I decided to test out gRPC along the way. This was a mistake. I hoped for the best, but gRPC ended up not being a good choice for the web client. Why? you ask. The gRPC protocol works with all the bells and whistles of http when used server to server, but web clients are not as great. The Javascript client is dependent on http 2.0, and it requires a proxy like Envoy to work with a browser. What's more, I didn't love the structure of the generated web client. So through the process of working on this 'local first stack' I actually got sucked in to a big rabbit hole in making the rpc system work. I ended up going with Connect which is a tool that can create a service from a protobuf service definition, that also talks a simple http 1.1 protocol. What ultimately sold me on this solution as the best is that it also came with a very nice to use web client generation, and even plugs in to my favorite react http helper useQuery.

Our stack at Escape is written in multiple languages because each team has specific needs. We use TypeScript for its vibrant ecosystem, Python for cybersecurity research and Go for performance-sensitive tasks. To orchestrate cross-language task orchestration, we first developed a simple request-response protocol over HTTP, but it wasn't sustainable as the Escape codebase grew rapidly. We evaluated several technologies to replace our homegrown protocol, and two emerged as the most promising options: Connect and Temporal. The title gives it away, but the reason is far from obvious

protobuf messages we’ll configure (@bufbuild/connect-es)

try https://github.com/bufbuild/connect-web

As for better gRPC-web, you might want to look into connect-web https://github.com/bufbuild/connect-web

They already have! Connect (https://github.com/bufbuild/connect-web) is what you're looking for, as it's grpc-web compatible.

Ye, fwiw there is an example code size comparison here:

https://github.com/bufbuild/connect-web/blob/main/packages/c...

I'm sure someone will chime in on the implementation details, but hopefully others can give it a try with their projects!